The Chilton Vacumatic

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There I was, minding my own business, researching yesterday’s article and just trying to learn when the different caps on Chilton pencils were made for my sleepy little pencil blog.  As I pawed through countless advertisements, a news piece popped up.

And my eyes popped out.

Arthur O. Dahlberg isn’t well known in pencil circles, but among pen historians, he is canonized as the inventor of the Parker Vacumatic, one of the most popular fountain pens in the hobby.

I wasn’t researching anything related to the Parker Vacumatic, or at least I didn't think I was; this article floated to the surface because of the following paragraphs:

“Fountain Pen Inventor

“In 1929, [Dahlberg] went east for the first time to take a post with the Chilton Pen company of New York City.  While working for this company, in an engineering capacity, he ‘intermittently invented pens, and improvements for them,’ he recounts.

“Among his inventions is the vacuum-filler pen which is now so popular throughout the country.  The patent was first sold to the Chilton company, but when that firm went broke in the crash of 1929, Dr. Dahlberg succeeded in getting his patent back, and only recently sold it to the Parker Pen Company.”

Huh, I thought.  I never knew that the Vacumatic was very nearly the Chilton Vacumatic.  But as I’ve mentioned a few times here over the years, pen guys and pencil guys tend to live under different rocks, and it’s always worth peeking under the other guy’s rock just to make sure what is news to you isn’t well known over there.  Call it seeing how the other half knows.

I posted the above article in a couple groups online and heard promptly from all the people I would expect to say pshaw . . . be gone, ye mere pencil folk.  Instead, the unanimous response was . . .

Huh.

What was known was that Dahlberg shopped his vacuum-filling pen idea around to various pen companies before Parker finally bit - but nobody suspected any connection with Chilton, and certainly nobody had any idea Dahlberg was actually in Chilton’s full-time employ at the time.

Yet here is Dahlberg’s own account, written just five years after he claims he was hired by Chilton – sending all of us back to the drawing board to see if this account could be verified.  Trevis Young pulled out his copy of the revered book on the subject, Parker Vacumatic by Geoffrey Parker, David Shepherd and Dan Zazove, and he reports there is no mention of a Chilton connection, even though several pages in the book are dedicated to Dahlberg.

Then Brian McQueen found something he hadn’t noticed before in Dahlberg’s agreement with Parker, which appears to confirm the 1934 news piece.  He sent me this screenshot:

In section 6, Dahlberg is warranting his title to his patent application for what would become the Vacumatic “. . . said Dahlberg representing that his only previous transaction affecting rights under or titles to any of said present inventions consists of a certain ‘license agreement’ dated August 22, 1929, between him and The Chilton Pen Company, and the ‘cancellation and general release’ dated September 20, 1930 cancelling the same . . ..”

So the 1934 account is essentially correct:  Dahlberg didn’t technically “sell” his patents, he sold Chilton the rights to use them.  Dahlberg “got them back” by convincing Chilton to release those rights so that he could sell them to someone else - and it was Parker which ultimately turned his invention, with several improvements, into the Vacumatic.

This account fits perfectly into what we know about Chilton’s history, as well.  From yesterday’s article, we know there was a noticeable lull in official company advertising after June, 1929; Chilton’s license was signed on August 22, 1929, just before – or while – the company moved to Long Island City.  The license was canceled on September 20, 1930, and Chilton ads for new colors and bulbous tops began in October, 1930.  Chilton either decided to go in a different direction or couldn't afford to refine Dahlberg's design and produce it.

Dahlberg would continue to take out other pen patents, with his last issued in 1947.  However, in retrospect he is better remembered for his accomplishments outside the field of writing instruments.  He was born in Escanaba, Michigan in 1898, and his education after high school was interrupted by was interrupted by World War I: after the United States entered the conflict, military personnel were dispatched to the school to provide military training to the student body, organizing a Students’ Army Training Corps (S.A.T.C.) of more than three thousand students - Dahlberg was assigned to naval training.  Here he is, pictured in the 1919 “Michiganensian: A War Record” in uniform:

He graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1920, then got his graduate degree in sociology from the University of Wisconsin in 1924.  That’s when he started tinkering with pens as a hobby, which resulted in his employment by Chilton and his later connection with Parker.

Dahlberg attracted national attention as an economist after the publication of one of his nine books, Jobs Machines and Capitalism (1932).  He became a policy advisor to the Hoover administration, then later worked for the NRA – that’s the other NRA, the Roosevelt administration’s “National Recovery Administration” dedicated to pulling the country out of the Great Depression.

It was during his work for Roosevelt that Dahlberg gained his greatest notoriety for a radical proposal to stimulate spending.  Dahlberg wanted to stop people from hoarding cash with essentially a ‘use it or lose it’ policy: he proposed printing currency in different colors each month, devaluing (taxing) the previous month’s paper money by one percent every month so that a dollar printed in one color would be worth less every month you held onto it.

The proposal drew ire and ridicule in the press in 1933-1934 and was never adopted:

But no publicity is bad publicity, and Dahlberg’s legacy was certainly assured.  He remained a noted economist for the remainder of his life, picking up additional degrees in economics from Harvard and The London School of Economics, founding the U.S. Economics Corporation in 1944, and creating the Visual Economics Library at Columbia University in 1951.  When the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly brought the United States to the brink of nuclear war, Dahlberg was back in the national headlines again with his vocal position that a war with Cuba would not stimulate the economy:

Arthur Dahlberg passed away on September 30, 1989.  Obituaries were published across the country; most published an abbreviated version of the one that ran in The New York Times, identifying Dahlberg as “economist and inventor of the Parker fountain pen”:

But note that this contains another claim: “he created the internal mechanism for the Parker fountain pen and the design of its arrow clip.”

Unlike the 1934 article, which was a contemporaneous account perfectly filling in a gap in what we knew about Dahlberg, the arrow clip claim was printed fifty years after the fact and appears at first to be inconsistent with what we know.  The Parker arrow clip was protected by a design patent filed on October 13, 1932 by Joseph B. Platt and Ivan D. Tefft, granted on December 27, 1932 as Design Patent 88,821:

Still, it seems like such an odd, random claim to make - especially in someone’s obituary, a place reserved for the most important accomplishments in a person’s life.  Dahlberg’s epitaph was (1) economist, (2) inventor of the Vacumatic, and (3) inventor of Parker’s arrow clip, so you would think all three of those things would be right.

Let’s look a bit more closely into that claim.  No, Dahlberg wasn’t the one who filed a design patent for the Parker arrow clip; however, if you look at Dahlberg’s patent history (I run them all down in American Writing Instrument Patents Vol. 2: 1911-1945), all of the patents he took out were utility patents.  If Dahlberg ever took out design patents, I’d be the first to agree that one of his three claims to fame might need to be scratched from his tombstone; however, since he was a mechanical engineer, it is plausible that he was only interested in protecting what went inside a pen – if he had an idea for the arrow clip, he might not have patented it and Parker picked up that ball after he darkened their door.

Next, have a closer look at that design patent and who signed it: Ivan Tefft’s name is signed twice, once as coinventor and once as attorney for Parker.

Why is that?  Was Tefft truly the coinventor, or was his name substituted on the patent application in someone else's place?  If Parker liked a clip Dahlberg had come up with at Chilton but Dahlberg hadn’t secured a patent for it yet, it is plausible Parker would substitute Tefft’s name in Dahlberg’s place on the patent application, to be discreet:  otherwise, Chilton might argue the clip was a work for hire to which Chilton might lay claim.

And then there’s one other detail, which may be just a coincidence . . . if you believe in coincidences, and after doing this research for all these years, I don’t believe in that sort of thing.  Recall that before Parker settled on the name “Vacumatic,” Parker called Dahlberg’s pen by another name: the “Golden Arrow.”

The Chilton Pen Company’s last gasp, just before the Thirties drew to a close, was the introduction of one last model . . . the “Golden Quill.”  I don’t have one of the pencils, but David Nishimura has a picture of one of the pens on his website, vintagepens.com - and here’s the clip:

Huh.  If you’re thinking this looks like the feathers on a Parker arrow clip turned upside down, and in particular like the “split arrow” Parker clips (introduced in 1938, just a year before the Golden Quill was introduced), but you don’t think there’s any connection between the names of the pens and design elements on their clips, then you’re dismissing these similarities as coincidences . . . because you believe in that sort of thing.

Answers to all these questions may be very close to within our reach.  Dahlberg’s papers, including his correspondence during the 1920s and 1930s, is inventoried at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum.  I’ve already emailed a request for information, and as soon as this virus thing eases a bit, they promise to scan documents from their files for me.

UPDATE: After this article ran, Hirsch Davis, an avid Chilton collector, asked: “Jon, were you joking when you mentioned a “Chilton Vacumatic”? It appears that at least one actually exists.”

The patent Dahlberg had licensed to Chilton, which he later assigned to Parker and which would later be refined to become the Vacumatic, was number 1,904,358:

Note that the blind cap on the end of Dahlberg’s pen was permanently attached to the end of the filling unit?

Reports Hirsch: “ I had originally thought that it might be an experimental prototype of the Seth Crocker pump filler. However, the filler is spring loaded. While I haven’t attempted to take the filler out, it appears much closer to a vacumatic mechanism.”

In the article, I had suggested it was possible that Chilton, in its weakened state after the stock market crash, might have released its rights to Dahlberg’s patent because it couldn’t afford to refine and produce his design. Now we know Chilton apparently did – even if only once.